The Market Slimes Back

by TS DeHaviland

 

This rant is brought to you by pink slime.

By now, you all know the story about how certain beef processing concerns have been treating trimmings that would otherwise be too dirty to be included in ground beef with ammonia and reinjecting it in their products. You’re familiar with the consternation that caused and the subsequent intercession of governors of the states in which these companies operate to attempt to revive the image of beef so extended.

I have a few problems with this, and they’re exemplary of the trouble I have with American businesses claiming to be in support of free market principles and then acting otherwise.

My first objection to pink slime is that when people buy ground beef, they don’t expect to get beef and filler, whether or not that filler is rendered chemically sterile. The producers of pink slime beef were trying to use technical loopholes in the federal guidelines to deceive the public and increase their profits by fooling us into buying an inferior product.

When we caught wind of it, we, the beef consumers of the United States, got reasonably upset and moved on to products that were what they purported to be.

That’s called the free market working exactly as it should: the market for pink slime dried up; those producers could no longer stay in business doing what they were doing. This happens all the time. There’s no market for pet rocks or powdered wigs either. Suck it up, dudes. To go whining and hiding beneath the skirts of government officials is about as anti-free market as it gets.

From a free-market perspective, the correct response would have been for these producers to change their products, just like Toyota had to do when people decided their brakes were bad. The veracity of the claim is immaterial; in the free market of consumer products, the consumer, ostensibly being “the market” of which we so often speak, rules, despite being sometimes stupid, wrong or ill-informed.

Then comes ALEC, a behind-the-scenes group that, instead of lobbying legislators for laws they like like everybody else has to do, just writes the legislation for our representatives and makes them sign it so as not to appear to be anti-business.

ALEC took a big PR hit when Common Cause exposed them as being behind a lot of the “stand your ground” legislation that has been implicated in the Treyvon Martin case. This led to a bunch of their high-profile corporate sponsors pulling out since they didn’t want their brand being associated with the shooting death of an unarmed black kid.

At first, ALEC, which prides itself on being all about the free market, did the proper free market thing and viewed this as a PR problem, pushing back in the market of ideas. But then they got–I don’t know–desperate or uppity or something, and they began claiming that this wasn’t fair because Common Cause was just exploiting ALEC’s past in order to drive contributions to Common Cause.

Well, so what if they were? Isn’t, again, that exactly what the free market is all about, pursuing rational self-interest in whatever market one finds oneself, in this case the market of non-profit public interest groups? Aren’t these the very principles that ALEC has been pushing all these years? What in the world gives them the right to then complain about those principles when they don’t go their way?

And that, really, is the other thing that bothers me: these businesses and chambers-of-commerce and “legislative exchange” councils are not, as they claim, pro free-market; they’re pro-business. And those are not always the same thing. The free market, properly speaking, can be incredibly hard on businesses in precisely the same way that the ecosystem, through predation or drought or fire or what-have-you, can be really hard on deer. This may very well be the way things are, but it really sucks if you’re a deer. Rather than being all about acting rationally, too much reliance on self-interest merely subjects us to excessive, pointless amounts of pain. That is exactly why these groups act like hypocrites: they want to “shrink government” to make it easier to manipulate in order to protect themselves and their established ways of doing things.

You don’t want to completely halt the market, of course, just in the same way that you don’t want to completely halt evolution; that leads to a weak and shallow gene pool. But you do want to attenuate it. That’s why humans invented cultures: they protect us from living the harsh lives of, say, deer. We’re just smart enough to realize we’re not deer and that it sucks to be them and that we can make things better through a little bit of deliberate, collective action. And within those cultures, we made markets for creating and distributing goods, the enhancement of those goods, and the introduction of desired efficiencies in creating those goods. This process somewhat resembles the evolution that is seen in nature, but, in the same way and for the same reasons, we have seen fit to attenuate it with laws, rules, regulations, folkways, morals, ethics, and the like.

An object lesson is the nation’s realization of this rather simple truth is the anti-trust legislation that followed the Gilded Age of the turn of the previous century, when people realized that if competition itself is not protected as a value and enforced through law, the market will trend toward monopoly, which threatens the freedom of the market itself, rendering it unable to deliver the efficiency, choice, innovation, and availability we expect it to deliver.

Our collective inability to understand these basic ideas has played out very well in the media’s utter failure to cover the recent re-investigation into China’s Foxconn, the company that makes a goodly number of our cheap electronics, including some beloved not-so-cheap ones from the purportedly innovative Apple. I won’t go deep into the details here, but as it turns out, reporters were shocked—SHOCKED–that Foxconn workers were forced to work tons of overtime.

First of all, overtime is a very Western worry: Foxconn workers actually want overtime because Chinese cities have become rather expensive places to live, and wages for factory workers have yet to align with that new reality. The ugly, yet strangely overlooked foundation of that fact is that Chinese factory workers are desperately poor, and that Western and Japanese companies take advantage of that poverty. Part of the reason Western and Japanese companies like China so much, as opposed to the myriad other places full of the desperate poor, is that Chinese workers are also subjects of a tyrannical dictatorship, and as such, are de facto devoid of what we might call “rights.”

If Apple or any other company working with Foxconn really cared about the lives of the people making their products, they would pay them not what every other Chinese factory worker makes but what middle-class workers in the West make. If they cared about their rights, they would either insist on not manufacturing anything in China until it changes its ways or they’d make their stuff someplace where people actually do have rights like, oh, I don’t know, Sweden or something.

If we want to fix this problem, we have to properly understand the analogy of the deer, who don’t stop dying just because they’re no longer dying on our doorsteps. And we are blessed with several solutions. If Apple and other companies have enough integrity to subject themselves to free market forces, we can play out our consumer roles and insist they change their ways by boycotting their products. Or we can insist they change their ways by out-lobbying them with our congresspeople and forcing the harsh and immoral realities of the market to heel.

I suspect we don’t do this because, despite our protestations at the injustice of it all, we love our cheap electronics more than we love the Chinese poor. If so, it’s not the self-serving hypocrisy of the free-marketeers we need to be worry about, but our own.

Comparison Disc Poems, Spring 2010

by Lael Ewy

 

Comparison Disc Series, Spring 2010

 

Beatles meet Bach, and both are changed,

that cultural constant we recall—like the grit

of couscous seeping oil onto your chicken-

fried steak.

 

 

“And I Love Her”

 

Space to roam a day

between notes, the Pyrenees

darkens to the north, a loose chord

on an ancient guitar.

 

 

Rich Girl

 

Rich girls in cardigans and capris,

another roll of the plastic virtual,

the loose slaves of blackheads

scoured by blank nails that even glitter

will not resolve.

 

 

Downtown, near the singing tracks,

bound up in gravel and steel, from a tinny boom

box, there is still, alarmingly, rock and roll.

 

 

Country Roads (Toots and the Maytals)

 

Ja flows off the sea, a breath from bold Selassie,

and the ocean, mother-warm, lost and longing,

and of memory.

 

 

 

 

Country Roads (John Denver)

 

Denver, the necessary folk-dork,

the genuine dork-folk, like they don’t coin

anymore: no big hat, no forced twang,

just John, singing bright, picking clean.

 

 

Joan Jett

 

Sex twisted around the cord on the gag

and the ball, or rather, the blush

of loving kicked hard from shank

to shin. Punk knows no bounds, lows.

 

 

Tommy James and the Shondells

 

Over and over the poppies burst–

the red and the green, the smooth

of a turn too bright

to not break down–

and inside!

A rainbow,

 

 

People Every Day

 

Popple and crack, the jones for vinyl

and the sun between the towering walls

buttressing the projects, a mindful

voice cries “why” over the stained-

with-glass blood.

 

 

Sly Stone

 

One horn section sums a century of coping.

On Being What It Isn’t: Illusion as Authenticity

 

by EW Wilder

 

Current politics would suggest that country music is somehow more “authentic,” more “real,” “closer to the people” than other popular forms. Politicians exploit this in order to surround themselves with a sort of faux-populism. Hipster theory posits that country music is fake—just pop with a twang—and that alt country is the most authentic thing going.

They’re both wrong, of course. Country music, like all other cultural artifacts, is by definition, artificial, as is alt country, folk, funk, the blues, jazz, classical, and rock ‘n’ roll. This is particularly evident in the US, where the culture has had a chance to create itself in contradistinction from the multitude of cultures that feed it. Since we have very little that defines “us” time out of mind, we can be a little more aware of how we have come to think America into being. This is maybe why we view ourselves as constantly in the business of self-creation: it’s an inevitable part of our national state of being. Arguably none of us would be here if we didn’t want some power over who we are.

This notion may be disturbing to some; for a person in the throes of “finding” herself, it can seem quite vital to believe that what she believes in is somehow “real,” rooted in something if not tangible, then at least well defined. We may have collectively come to terms with the fact that Bob Dylan is a character created by Robert Zimmerman, but it may be more difficult to swallow that Woody Guthrie was also a creation, or that Hank Williams was as well. We may have a lot invested in 50 Cent being a more genuine voice of the streets than Will Smith—after all, Fitty has the scars to prove it. But they’re both the creations of the men who portray them: they exist, as we know them, as public personae designed to put us in a certain state of mind, one that we feel more “real” inhabiting than we do in our daily lives.

That state of mind really does influence us, though. Whether or not it breaks or reinforces our stereotypes, whether or not it’s a helpful or a harmful state, is a matter of open and healthy debate, but when we try to emulate those who present an image we find particularly compelling, we prove an even more disturbing fact: We, the People are just as fake as those celebrities we revere. That is because we’re all just as desperate to find somebody to be. Cultures in which people don’t have identity crises are also cultures that tend not to have civilizations with complex categories of labor specialization. In those cultures, you are who you are because of who you were born, not because of who you choose to be. Most people in these cultures have to do mostly the same things to survive. There’s no need to “find” yourself because you were never lost.

By contrast, a young, rural, red-state American, who may otherwise find his life rather ill-defined, living in a small town that seems increasingly irrelevant and decreasingly full of opportunities, may look to country music to help delineate and legitimate his experience. Country music presents a culturally acceptable set of values and gives him someone to be, even if those values ultimately further isolate his community and further narrow his prospects. In terms of everyday functioning, it’s more important for the psyche to know what it is than it is to project itself into a future that might jeopardize that sense of self. In the end, we’re influenced by cultural constructs like country music or action movies not because they speak to who we actually are but because they speak to who we aspire to be. Our relationships to cultural creations are not about who we are but who we think we are (or ought to be).

Such cultural malleability is, perhaps, the price we pay for our political and economic freedom, but it’s one that need not derail us too much. Just because nobody would believe that a Jewish kid from Hibbing, Minnesota (Hibbing has Jews?) could have anything to say about “genuine” American experience, Robert Zimmerman had to create Bob Dylan (and name himself after a Welsh poet) to say those things that he thought were true. This is the very root of fiction and its power; it is also the root of spiritualism: the shaman, too, is the creation of the person embodying him. This is the legerdemain necessary to get a message across, to influence that culture into which you are creating. And the message is the point. Whether or not Lady Gaga is a fake is entirely beside the point: of course she is. What she is saying (not only in her music but through her persona) is what’s important, and in that way she is very consciously emulating Madonna, tapping directly into her precursor as a cultural icon. And Madonna, in turn, tapped into a preexisting set of icons as well.

As long as you also accept this about yourself, you are in control, and thereby you are empowered to ask yourself whether or not that persona you have created is doing any good. Is your persona keeping you from connecting with others? From seeing what is going on around you? From learning from your experiences? How are you using the persona that is you to open yourself up rather than close yourself down? How can you use your fakery to better experience the truly authentic, without and within?

Comparison Disc Poems, Series 1

Lael Ewy

 

 

Comparison Disc Series #1

 

 

 

Cake

 

easy as rising and yeasty

as soda, as long as the jacket

which covers a barely-skirted

bum, as sweet as the sweat

in all our fluid memories, the curves

of the psychosexual rave.

 

 

 

Sweet Jane

 

Your smile purled

by one tiny stitch. Older

you’d regret the lines left:

traces of joy,

traces of pain.

 

 

Ice

 

Cheese even then, poof cake,

but despite all that, cool,

in a white-kid-form-the-suburbs way

that perpetual 15 reinvents cool

perpetually.

 

 

 

 

 

Under Pressure

 

For your pleasure the street, the pressure

of the eyes, but squashed languid into a baseline

like a trans-Atlantic flight, stretched from pale

London to the sparkling New York sidewalk’s

mica; humanity, finally, amounts to geology.

 

 

What Can’t U Touch

 

Hammer hit harder than we recall, but slammed

mostly his own fingers, and, lamed, preaches now

what perhaps all along should have been: the Gospel

according to Hammer, M.C.

 

 

Superfreak

 

An unlikely subject for the soul: the girl you don’t take home,

but the one you most want to be with when you’re with the one

you will. Even her toenails appear, but such is obsession: the most

interest is, after all, the prurient.

 

 

Spanish Harlem

 

No love is innocent, not even that rose, picked

so to grow in my garden, a possession. The special

one of dreams is the stem of a blossom of the deepest

place imaginable: Harlem, the exotic within, the dream,

the bloom of sex, the blush of id in broad day.

 

 

 

 

 

Blues for Johann

 

The one who penned the “Coffee Cantata” must have been blue,

the man who fathered a nation of notes and played his organ

into perpetuity, who filled, dutiful, every Sabbath’s mandate

by a measure of grain and a casket of beer. Melancholia

and introspection are intertwined: the epigenetics

of existence, the essence of worship, the dedication

that is meditation, tonic for the unworthy, the blessed,

grazing safely in the fields of the great unwashed.